CarPlay support?

[luke2m]

It would be great to have Apple CarPlay support added to this app. I’m not sure how hard this would be, but it seems to be possible with React Native.

[scgf]

Yes, I agree. I just setup Jellyfin and remote access and the app looks really beautiful. Playing music in my car I can access it on my CarPlay screen if I go to Now Playing, but there is no Car Play app for Jellyfin Audio Player.

It has been a year since @luke2m posted his comment. Is Car Play support being worked on?

[leinelissen]

Hey @scgf! Thanks for tuning in. I agree that getting CarPlay in would be a really cool feature and a nice challenge to work on. Unfortunately I maintain and extend this app in my spare time, and there are other issues and features that are currently higher on my priority list. I would love to see this happen, but this is not going to be picked up in the near future. Now if you are up for a challenge yourself, and if you have a knack for React Native stuff, I am more than happy to give a few pointers how you could come to an implementation. I would love to help out to get this in.

[scgf]

Thanks for your reply @leinelissen . Unfortunately I have no useful expertise with these things!

[jenkshields]

Kia ora! I've just started using Fintunes and it's great! I searched for this issue because I'd love to help improve the carplay support - I've got experience with react but not RN, but I'd love to hear those pointers if you're still interested!

[leinelissen]

Hi @jenkshields, thanks for using it from the other side of the planet! React Native is not that different from regular React, other than that the elements are a bit different (i.e. <View />s instead of <div />s) and the build process is a lot more complex and prone to breakage.

You can try getting to a build first: firstly, clone the repo, then, npm install the Node dependencies. Then, make sure you've installed Xcode. If you haven't already, install CocoaPods, and then run pod install in the ios directory. Now that you're mostly setup, you should be able to run npm start in one terminal, and then npm run ios in another. An iOS simulator should be launched containing the app. That concludes the first part.

Once you've done that, you can get to crafting a CarPlay integration. From what I see, the most straightforward package for doing so is react-native-carplay. You should be able to set it up using the instructions that are provided in the repository and run it in the simulator.

Now comes the hard part. From what I can see, you don't have full control over the CarPlay UI, but have to rely on a set of templates that are supplied by Apple. Good news: they look kinda good, and there's one specifically for a Now Playing screen (see PDF). Bad news: this template needs to be wrapped in react-native-carplay, and they don't have a wrapper right now. I don't think implementing it should be insanely hard, but you're going to have to dive in some Objective-C.

If you get as far as fixing this, implementing all the data bindings should be a breeze, since I've built some hooks (useCurrentTrack and useQueue) to retrieve all the relevant data.

Feel free to fork the repo and create a draft Pull Request. More than happy to track how you're faring and help out if necessary. Let me know if anything's unclear!

[isvein]

Any news here? :-)

[leinelissen]

It appears some people have been successful with getting this set up for CarPlay (birkir/react-native-carplay#175). I think this should be feasible for someone willing to take it up. I'm curious to look at it, but still don't have time right now.

[nigiriemoji]

AFAIK there's only 1 other jellyfin music ios app with carplay: Manet. It's closed source unfortunately. You may be able to find some open source plex music apps to see how carplay implementation works

Finamp has android auto for its beta but nothing yet for ios carplay